2 more confirmed cases; officials try to stem fear

Naftali Bendavid and Jeff ZelenyWashington Bureau

An assistant to CBS News anchor Dan Rather and a postal worker in New Jersey tested positive for anthrax Thursday, bringing the number of confirmed cases in the bioterrorism scare to six, with another New Jersey postal employee strongly believed to have the disease.

The new anthrax cases came as the Bush administration rolled out a public-relations campaign, spearheaded by Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, to reassure the public.

Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), the Senate's only physician, played a similar role in Congress, emphasizing that experts had found no new cases of anthrax exposure on Capitol Hill after the 31 reported Wednesday. "Things are under control," Frist said. "The system is working."

The FBI and the Postal Service, meanwhile, announced a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprits behind the anthrax-tainted mail.

The Postal Service also announced plans to mail a postcard to every address in the United States in coming days, outlining how to spot and handle suspicious packages. Postal officials will publish a poster on the subject for distribution to the nation's corporate mailrooms.

The anthrax scare spread Thursday to Africa, where Kenyan officials announced that a letter mailed Sept. 8 from Atlanta to a family in Nairobi contained anthrax spores.

While dozens of cases of suspicious powders cropped up Thursday from China to Japan to Germany, the package in Nairobi was the first piece of confirmed anthrax-tainted mail received outside the U.S. since the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In New York, CBS joined ABC and NBC as sites of apparent anthrax contamination.

An assistant to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw tested positive for the disease earlier in the week, as did the baby of an ABC producer. Those two and the CBS staffer are expected to recover.

Network officials said the CBS employee was being treated for cutaneous, or skin-based, anthrax. The source of the infection was unclear.

The employee, Claire Fletcher, 27, regularly opens mail addressed to Rather, but there is "no knowledge of any letter or any other suspicious material coming into the building," said CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

The woman first noticed swelling on her cheek around Oct. 1. At first she suspected an insect bite and contacted her physician, who prescribed penicillin. As anthrax cases surfaced elsewhere, CBS News contacted authorities, and the employee was examined again.

The New Jersey postal worker was thought to have developed the same form of anthrax, which is less severe than the inhaled form, while handling mail containing the bacteria. Anthrax-tainted letters that were sent to New York and Washington were postmarked Trenton, N.J., and the infected woman worked in the West Trenton post office in nearby Ewing, N.J.

In addition, tests on a male worker at a mail-processing facility in Trenton strongly suggested that he, too, had been infected with skin-based anthrax. While officials said a blood test on the man came back positive for anthrax, the diagnosis could not be corroborated by a skin biopsy because he already was on antibiotics.

Handling draws criticism

As the anthrax scare has grown during the past week, the public information delivered by the Bush administration and Congress has been criticized as fragmentary, contradictory and sometimes incorrect. Ridge, who was sworn in as homeland security director 10 days ago, has until now kept a low profile.

But Ridge swept into public view in a big way Thursday, holding an hourlong news conference featuring Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Surgeon General David Satcher and Postmaster General John Potter. Ridge also brought reporters into the White House for a roundtable session in the Roosevelt Room.

The day's presentations were designed to signal reassurance and control, even as little new information was disseminated. Virtually all the senior officials at the news conference emphasized how much the government is doing to handle the crisis.

"The American people can have confidence that their government is working around the clock to protect them," said Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor who Bush considered tapping as his running mate. "We assembled this group today ... to show you that on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, every single day, there is communication and collaboration between all agencies of government."

Ridge also noted that for all the alarm, few infections have been discovered among the "thousands and thousands" who have been tested.

Bombing convictions hailed

Ashcroft joined the public-relations offensive, hailing Thursday's sentencing of four defendants for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa as a major victory.

"In the war against terrorism, America won a battle today," Ashcroft declared. "The United States will hunt terrorists down and will make them pay the price for their evil acts."

Investigators continued trying to nail down links among the anthrax cases in New York and Washington and those at a Florida media company. Officials have said the bacteria in Florida and New York are from the same strain, while the anthrax-laced letters sent to NBC and to Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) bore similar handwriting.

Ashcroft said the anthrax attacks, along with the slew of hoaxes, could be the work of more than one person.

"We have ruled out neither international terrorism nor domestic terrorism," he said. "We think it may be ill-advised to think about the situation in terms of an either-or matrix."

Investigators contacted pharmacies to see whether anyone tried to obtain large quantities of the anthrax treatment Cipro in the days before the attacks. And federal agents swarmed over New Jersey on Thursday. The letter to Daschle contained an innocent-looking return address from "4th grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park NJ 08852."

There is no such school, but FBI agents interviewed administrators at Greenbrook School near Franklin Park this week.

On Capitol Hill, nasal swabs for anthrax spores have been taken from more than 3,000 people, and the testing continues.

Authorities backed off early reports that the anthrax sample from Daschle's office was a particularly virulent and pure strain. "The idea that it was some more-potent strain was not accurate," said Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker.

Government specialists began sampling surfaces in House and Senate office buildings and soon will start taking airborne samples.

`Overburdened' by threats

Law-enforcement officials have been bedeviled by numerous hoaxes, and Ashcroft acknowledged that investigators are becoming "overburdened" by thousands of real and false anthrax threats.

In most years, the FBI handles about 250 alerts involving chemical or biological threats, but over the past 18 days it has been inundated with more than 3,300, including 2,500 involving anthrax.

Trying to stem that tide, prosecutors have charged four people in recent days in connection with anthrax-related hoaxes, two for lying to investigators and two for falsely threatening to use biological weapons.

More than 100 threatening letters containing a suspicious powder have been sent to Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country. Not all have been tested, but those that have appear harmless.

Those letters have similar characteristics: a preprinted return address from the U.S. Marshal's Service or the U.S. Secret Service and a threatening message inside, sometimes describing the enclosed powder as anthrax, other times referring to the "Army of God," an anti-abortion group.

Five such letters have been received by Planned Parenthood offices in the Chicago area, according to Vasyl Markus, vice president for public policy of the organization's local chapter. Two were opened and three were not, and all have been submitted for testing.

If the federal response to the anthrax outbreak has at times lacked a single reassuring voice, Ridge began trying to assume that role, promising many more briefings in coming days and acknowledging he had been hard to find.

"I thought it was the appropriate time to come out and just align all the resources," Ridge said.

Tribune staff reporters Jill Zuckman in Washington, Monica Davey in Chicago, Mickey Ciokajlo in New Jersey, and Evan Osnos and Stevenson Swanson contributed to this report.